Repository of adventures.

Month: October 2007

Still working three jobs. Pulling 50 hours a week at this point which compared to the last few years isn’t so bad. Searching out the perfect grad school within the perfect foreign location (with all hope). The past few weeks have been incredibly busy and its only going to get “worse” as November 1st roles around. For those of you who don’t know, November is National Novel Writing Month. From the 1st to the 30th, writers are challenged to write a novel from scratch. Now I’ve been waiting for this since last year. I’ve spent the past two months running edits and tying up loose ends on a 200 page manuscript I started writing 12 years ago. I can’t explain how surreal it is picking up where I left off over a decade ago and continuing the saga. I have had so much time to meditate on the story and so many possible scenarios have gone through my head, I consider the last 12 years a gift of sorts. At the same time, I haven’t settled on one thing. I know where I am going (aka how it “ends”), but I don’t know how I’m going to get there. Scary how its sort of a metaphor for life.

I may post portions of the story up here occasionally, but remember that these will be rough cuts. November is for writing. December is for editing. So when i say rough I’m talking bare bones story, simple and repeated words, misspellings, grammatical cluster fuc*s, incomplete sentances, and likely a few loopholes. So if I seem a little cranky these next few weeks, just remember I’m juggling three jobs, a social life and writing 1666 words a day. Be nice and you might end up a character.

Anyone else who has planned on partaking can add me on the NaNoWriMo website. My user name is WatertownSurfer.

That’s all, more soon!

For those interested:

Press Release:

NaNoWriMo is a fun, seat-of-your-pants approach to novel writing. Participants begin writing November 1. The goal is to write a 175-page (50,000-word) novel by midnight, November 30.

Valuing enthusiasm and perseverance over painstaking craft, NaNoWriMo is a novel-writing program for everyone who has thought fleetingly about writing a novel but has been scared away by the time and effort involved.

Because of the limited writing window, the ONLY thing that matters in NaNoWriMo is output. It’s all about quantity, not quality. The kamikaze approach forces you to lower your expectations, take risks, and write on the fly.

Make no mistake: You will be writing a lot of crap. And that’s a good thing. By forcing yourself to write so intensely, you are giving yourself permission to make mistakes. To forgo the endless tweaking and editing and just create. To build without tearing down.

As you spend November writing, you can draw comfort from the fact that, all around the world, other National Novel Writing Month participants are going through the same joys and sorrows of producing the Great Frantic Novel. Wrimos meet throughout the month to offer encouragement, commiseration, and—when the thing is done—the kind of raucous celebrations that tend to frighten animals and small children.

In 2006, we had over 79,000 participants. Nearly 13,000 of them crossed the 50k finish line by the midnight deadline, entering into the annals of NaNoWriMo superstardom forever. They started the month as auto mechanics, out-of-work actors, and middle school English teachers. They walked away novelists.

So, to recap:

What: Writing one 50,000-word novel from scratch in a month’s time.

Who: You! We can’t do this unless we have some other people trying it as well. Let’s write laughably awful yet lengthy prose together.

Why: The reasons are endless! To actively participate in one of our era’s most enchanting art forms! To write without having to obsess over quality. To be able to make obscure references to passages from our novels at parties. To be able to mock real novelists who dawdle on and on, taking far longer than 30 days to produce their work.

When: Sign-ups begin October 1, 2007. Writing begins November 1. To be added to the official list of winners, you must reach the 50,000-word mark by November 30 at midnight. Once your novel has been verified by our web-based team of robotic word counters, the partying begins.